Storm: What a mess!

An early winter storm that couldn't make up its mind whether to snow or rain did both on Monday and Tuesday. The heavy wet slush fouled roads, shorted power lines and leaked through roofs all over central Oregon.

"One of our linemen told me has worked here 31 years and he's never experienced anything like last night," said Jim Crowell, member services director for Central Electric Cooperative.

Almost all of the power outages were caused by a buildup of heavy snow on lines that caused them to come into contact with each other, or snow on tree branches that dropped onto the lines, according to CEC.

Traffic accidents caused by the storm closed the major arteries into central Oregon. The infamous third street underpass in Bend south of Franklin Street flooded and a vehicle was stuck in the puddle, forcing the Highway Division to reroute traffic. It was to be closed until noon on Tuesday.

There were three snow slides along the Santiam Pass near Hogg Rock on Monday, according to Dave Davis, Public Information Officer with the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Davis estimated those closures lasted about a half hour each, for a total of about two hours by the time two-way traffic was fully restored. Davis had some concern about what might occur in that area as temperatures warmed and the snow and earth became less stable.

On Tuesday, Davis said a "fairly major" earth slide about seven miles east of Gates closed the highway between Sisters and Salem. One lane traffic was expected to reopen about noon.

But the main inconvenience to most people in the Sisters area were power outages.

CEC's Crowell said what made the storm so devastating was the sheer number of wires that were downed or shorted -- many serving only two or three homes. He estimated there were more than 600 sites where CEC crews had to restore service, and some of those would fail again after crews left.

By Tuesday morning some linemen had been working 26 to 30 hours straight to restore service. That was a concern, Crowell said, because of the possibility of fatigue-caused mistakes.

"Make a mistake in this business and it is pretty serious," he pointed out.

CEC has 28 linemen, Crowell said, but "even if we had 50 more, we wouldn't have everybody back on."

CEC did have service restored to 90 percent of the affected customers by Tuesday morning.